The Greatest Enemy to Loving Yourself

Stop looking for love in all the wrong places.

“If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror.” — Byron Katie

Self-love is hard, and it’s a long journey for most of us.

After all, we’ve been conditioned to look outside for love. We don’t realise that we’re sitting on a gold mine and we can give ourselves the love we’ve always craved for from others.

So, the self-love journey is fundamentally about changing our relationship with ourselves. And on this journey we will learn that it is the most important relationship we will ever have in our life.

After all, we are the common denominator in all our life’s ups and downs, and we are with ourselves 24/7 while other people — no matter how close they are to us— come in and out of our life.

Therefore, don’t delegate to others the responsibility to be on your own side and to love yourself. When you realise your self-love is the source of love in your life, and give it to yourself no matter what, you will feel like that you have finally come home to yourself.

In fact, loving yourself is like coming full circle after you have been looking for love everywhere else, often in all the wrong places.

In the book The Alchemist, the shepherd boy Santiago dreamed of a treasure and set off in search of it. As it turned out, the treasure that he had been looking for was buried in the ruins where he had the dream in the first place. It was there all along and all it took was for him to rediscover it.

Self-love is like that. You already have it inside of you and all you have to do is to rediscover it. Isn’t that an empowering realisation?

The Biggest Barrier to Self-Love

However, before we can rediscover the love that’s already inside of us, we need to look at what’s in its way. After all, if it were easy to rediscover it, we’d have done it a long time ago. So, what’s stopping us? You. Or more specifically, your inner critic. It feeds on the common myths about self-love and other triggers — such as comparison and perfectionism — to come up with the harsh criticism and judgment that we hear all day long inside our heads.

So, instead of having a loving, compassionate relationship with ourselves, we have a dysfunctional relationship that’s full of judgment, criticism, contempt, and even hatred.

Unfortunately, we are all too familiar with that harsh voice:

“You never finish things.”

“Nobody cares.”

“You don’t have what it takes.”

Our inner critic stems from shame and is trying to make sure that we measure up and fit in. In reality, however, it keeps us stuck, isolated and feeling small. No matter how hard we work or how much we prepare — or over-work and over-prepare — it never feels like enough. We’re never able to measure up.

It also keeps us silent, unable to tell our truth or share our vulnerabilities with others, preventing us from letting other people into our world or asking for their help.

However, our inner critic isn’t our enemy. It was created early in our lives to protect us, and the mean things it says inside our heads are sweet-but-misguided attempts to take care of ourselves. It’s not true and it’s not even about you.

We’re All Work-In-Progress

I’ve done a lot of work on befriending my inner critic and noticing when and how it’s being triggered. However, I still get tripped up from time to time and fall into a deep, dark pit of self-loathing and despair.

During the writing of my first book, I hit a dry spell and hardly wrote anything for a month. It wasn’t because I had a writer’s block, so I couldn’t blame it on that. I had an good run of writing the month before, so that made me took my foot off the pedal somewhat at the start of the new month. Then I was away for 10 days, got a bad case of food poisoning during the trip and spent another week recovering from it after I came home.

Before I knew it, I was staring down the end of the month.

As a new mum who only had scraps of spare time here and there, I relied heavily on taking baby steps consistently to get anything done. So, it was difficult to come to terms with the fact I had “wasted” a whole month. I could feel anxiety building inside of me, and I struggled to get back on track with my writing.

In reality, I had managed to do some writing prep work during the month, where I journalled, read a few books and articles on my topic and made notes while I read.

But my anxious brain wouldn’t acknowledge that reality. Instead, it convinced me that the time I spent away from actual writing meant I had done nothing. My mind chatter told me the I was falling behind and wouldn’t be able to catch up.

It whispered in my ear that I was a loser, had no discipline, and never finished things. And who was I to think that I could write a book, anyway?

Luckily I found my way through those moments. The inner critic tends to cloud our thinking making it hard to tell what’s real. But that’s what we need most. We need to ground ourselves in our truth to quell the feelings of anxiety and despair.

You’re Already Whole

“Brokenness is learned, not innate. Our work is to find our way back to what is already whole.” — Geneen Roth

Instead of trying to overcome or get rid of our inner critic, learn to accept it. After all, it’s just trying to protect us — albeit in a clumsy way — from failure and disappointment. If we don’t try, we won’t fail, right?

What’s more, healing occurs when we love and accept all parts of ourselves, not just the “good” parts. So, accepting our critical part is just important as embracing our joyful and loving parts.

Remind yourself of your inherent goodness and that you’re doing the best with what you have. In other words, you are a good person but sometimes you make stupid choices or say the wrong things. The key is to love and accept yourself as you are — even if you don’t change.

In other words, self-love is about loving who you are, not the best version of you. There’s no “there” to get to, no 101 things to do before you’re perfect, because you’re already whole and complete. Right now.

In a world obsessed with self-help and personal development, that’s a radical stand — and a welcome relief. We are standing up for ourselves and our enoughness, rather than being stuck on a hamster wheel trying to constantly “improve” ourselves.

A Truer Version of You

Striving to be the best version of you is fine, but it can get tiring after a while. Remembering and appreciating who you already are is about removing the blinders that are in the way and it only takes a shift in your perspective.

In other words, it’s not about adding more to become a “better” version of you, it’s about letting go of the old version of you— along with your limiting beliefs and fears — to reveal the truer version of you.

After all, it’s easy to identify with life’s challenges and all our shortcomings and mistakes, but we can choose to identify with the unchanging wholeness and love that lie beneath all that.

It’s time to rediscover your unchanging wholeness and love.

It’s time to come home to yourself.

Annie is an ICF-certified life coach. She is the author of Brave Again: You Roadmap from Heartbreak to Happiness and has a quick guide on silencing the inner critic.